“I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.”
– Henry Luce

Saturday, 31 March 2012

USES AND GRATIFICATIONS Theory

Introduction:
The core question of this
theory is Why do people use media and what do they got use media for them.
There exists a basic idea in this approach: audience members know media
content, and which media they can use to meet their needs.

It suggests that people’s needs influence what
media they would choose, how they use certain media and what gratifications the
media give them. The approach emphasizes
audiences’ reasons for using a certain media to the disregard of others. And
the various gratifications obtained from the media, based on individual social
and psychological requirements.

Origin and History - The Hypodermic Needle model, discusses
that “the mass media have a direct, immediate and influential effect upon
audiences by ‘injecting’ information into the consciousness of the
masses”. In these Uses & gratification
studies, researchers discovered a list of functions served either by some
specific content or by the medium itself. For instance, Television soap operas
were found to satisfy their listeners with advice, support, or occasions for
emotional; rather than just offering information. The newspaper was also
discovered to be important to give readers a sense of security, shared topics
of conversation and a structure to the daily routine

Uses and
gratifications approach became prevailing in the 1970s and it was rediscovered
during by Elihu Katz the structure of the
approach. Elihu Katz is served both as a sociologist and as a communication
researcher. They also discovered that media served the functions of surveillance, correlation, entertainment and
cultural transmission for both society and individuals.

Five basic
assumptions

1.The
audience is conceivedas active: i.e., an important part of mass media use is
assumed to be goal oriented. Patterns of
media use are shaped by more or less definite expectations of what certain
kinds of content have to offer the audience member.

2. Audience gratification: In the
mass communication process, much initiative connected with the need and gratification of audience and the media
choice lies with the audience member.

3. Depend on Audience response: People
are sufficiently self-aware to be able to report their interests and motives in
particular cases, or at least to recognize them when confronted with them in an
intelligible and familiar verbal formulation.

4. Culture of Audience: The cultural
significance of audience also influences the gratification and need of mass
communication. Different people can use the same communication message for very
different purposes. The same media content may gratify different needs for
different individuals. There is not only one way that people uses media;
contrarily, there are as many reasons for using the media as their basic needs,
social situation, and the individual’s background, such as experience,
interests, and education, affect people’s ideas about what they want from media
and which media best meet their needs. That is, audience members are aware of
and can state their own motives and gratifications for using different media.

McQuail’s
(1983) classification of the following common reasons for media use:Information: finding out about relevant events and
conditions in immediate surroundings, society and the world ,seeking advice on
practical matters or opinion and decision choices ,satisfying curiosity and
general interest ,learning; self-education ,gaining a sense of security through
knowledge.

Personal Identity : People use
the media to finding
reinforcement for personal values ,finding models of behavior ,identifying with
valued others (in the media) ,gaining insight into oneself.

Integration and Social Interaction: The main gratification the uses of media is gaining insight
into the circumstances of others; social empathy, identifying with others and
gaining a sense of belonging, finding a basis for conversation and social
interaction, having a substitute for real-life companionship, helping to carry
out social roles, enabling one to connect with family, friends and society.

Entertainment: The one of
the main media content usageisescaping, or being diverted, from problems, relaxing, getting intrinsic cultural or aesthetic enjoyment, filling time, emotional
release, sexual arousal.

Criticisms of Uses and Gratifications
Research

Although uses and gratifications
approach holds a significant status in communication research, the research of
the approach receives criticisms both on its theory and methodology
represented. McQuail (1994) commented
that the approach has not provided much successful prediction or casual
explanation of media choice and use.

The
researchers criticized uses and gratifications approach in such three aspects:

1.It is highly individualistic, taking
into account only the individual psychological gratification derived from
individual media use. The social context of the media use tends to be ignored.
This overlooks the fact that some media use may have nothing to do with the
pursuit of gratification - it may be forced upon us for example.

2.There is relatively little attention paid to media content,
researchers attending to why people use the media, but less to what meanings
they actually get out of their media use.

3. The approach starts from the view that the media Uses and
gratifications research focus on the fact relied heavily on self-reports.
Self-reports, however, are based on personal memory which can be problematic.
As such, the respondents might inaccurately recall how they behave in media use
and thus bend might occur in the study.